Thursday, April 26, 2007

Wolfowitz: Up against the wall Paul

David Seaton's News LinksPaul Wolfowitz, whose every failure has been handsomely rewarded, is certainly the most visible, successful and symbolic of the neocons.Over a half a million Iraqis have died, millions have been displaced. These are people who had never done any harm to the USA.

Their pain, their fear and their blood cry out for justice.

Thousands of Americans have been killed, maimed or crippled by this war, mistakenly believing in good faith that their sacrifice was in defense of their country and its flag when, in fact, they have been led to besmirch and desecrate them.

Their pain, their fear and their blood cry out for justice. People are sent to prison everyday for stealing a car or a purse...Until Wolfowitz and the others he represents are brought to trial for war crimes it will be impossible to begin to address the damage that has been done to America's central belief in the goodness of its own nature. DS

Andrew Cockburn: The puppet who cleared the way for Iraq's destruction - Guardian Abstract: Among those relishing the exposure of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz's manoeuvres on behalf of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, in recent weeks was almost certainly the former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was driven from public life thanks to the catastrophe of Iraq, and for the moment at least lurks in obscurity. Wolfowitz, his deputy until 2005, contributed in almost equal measure to the debacle, yet managed to slide from the Pentagon into the presidency of a leading international institution with every chance to redeem himself. Blame for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, bungling over troop levels, chaos in Iraq's reconstruction, and the general meltdown in Pentagon management has all too often been laid at Rumsfeld's door alone. However, Wolfowitz was an energetic enabler of these outrages and many other notorious initiatives.(...) Before we conclude that Wolfowitz was the original author of the policies that destroyed Iraq, we should note that his entire career, at least up through his Pentagon service, has been in the service and at the direction of others. His early work in Washington promoting the dubious merits of an anti-ballistic missile programme, for example, was sponsored by Paul Nitze, a powerful insider who devoted a lifetime of intrigue to boosting east-west tensions and US defence spending. Nitze served as godfather to the neoconservative movement in the 70s, correctly calculating that a fusion of the pro-Israel lobby with the military-industrial lobby would create an alliance of unstoppable power. Among the early and most potent recruits was an old friend of Wolfowitz's, Richard Perle, known and feared in Washington as "the Prince of Darkness" for his ruthless bureaucratic skills and commanding position in the neoconservative forces. The relationship flourished into Wolfowitz's sojourn in the Pentagon. Officials who worked closely with him remarked to me on the amount of time Perle, then a close associate of Conrad Black, spent closeted with the deputy secretary. They remained in constant touch, as Wolfowitz's phone logs attest. Other regular recipients of Wolfowitz calls included Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney and now a convicted felon, and Robin Cleveland. Cleveland was in charge of national security programmes at the White House office of management and budget. From that powerful position, according to a former close colleague of Wolfowitz's, she "was one of the most important people in the group that gave us the Iraq war". Late last year Perle and other leading neoconservatives lashed out publicly at Rumsfeld, deriding his mismanagement of the Iraqi enterprise they had worked so hard to set in train. "Interesting they are not going after the puppet," the former colleague emailed me in reference to Wolfowitz's absence from his old friends' denunciations. Given recent sordid revelations, his role in shredding the reputation of the World Bank and the morale of its employees may be harder to obscure. READ IT ALL